This thesis investigates the differences between live blogs and traditional online news articles, and differences in how readers evaluate them. Building on developments in reader response studies, news media studies, and studies of evaluative language, I analysed live blogs and traditional online news articles for their structure and use of evaluative language. I show how live blogs present news events as more temporally close to the reader than traditional online news articles and ascribe evaluations of the reported news events to news actors, while traditional online news articles present evaluations ofthe news events more often as objective. Additionally, I conducted twenty interviews in an experimental setting with live blog or traditional online news article readers. I used qualitative linguistic analysis to investigate evaluations of the news texts and evaluations of the news events following the Appraisal framework. This analysis showed that all readers implicitly evaluated news events following news values. It also showed that readers of live blogs were more likely than traditional online news article readers to evaluate news events as affective, ascribing these evaluations to the inclusion of social media, primarily Tweets, in the live blogs.

This thesis, ‘Broadcasting Modernity’ is an account of sound technology, namely wireless, as a feature of early twentieth century literature. If modernism is a historical-specific movement, and language a repository of time, then the advent of radio broadcasting cannot be ignored - a medium which inscribed itself into the pages of books. The present study is original, in that it establishes radio as a portal through which to regard the wider cultural mentality, cross-cutting, or ‘crashing’ the written word, and thus producing the effect of two wires instantly reacting to one another. Therefore, just as radio may be accessed through literature, certain texts between 1900-1945 may be reinterpreted acoustically. To qualify this argument, a select group of writers are discussed individually, and at length – figures who allowed radio to affect their creative output, at various levels, in a period of rapid technological change.

This thesis provides an original contribution to ongoing research on so-called Islamic State (‘IS’) by using a multiple case-study approach to offer an in-depth analysis of Arabic and English language narratives related to four atrocities committed by the group: (1) the mass killing of hundreds of Iraqi soldiers, known as the Speicher massacre, (2) the captivity and sexual enslavement of Ezidi girls, known in Arabic as sabi, (3) the executions of a number of western, Arab, and Kurd victims, and (4) the destruction of cultural artefacts in Nineveh province. The analysis engages with the discourses of ‘IS’, western, Arabic, Iranian, and Kurdish media, survivors, ‘IS’s’ religious opponents, and other actors. The dissertation uses a social narrative theory as its conceptual framework that I seek to develop by focusing on the fragmentation in narratives, on one hand, and on the multimodal resources through which narratives circulate, on the other. To this end, I combine the theory with Boje’s (2001) notion of antenarrative and Kress’(2009) understanding of the three resources of discourse, genre, and mode, to investigate ways in which narratives first unfold and how they later change as they are translated. Translation is understood in the thesis as a multi-directional movement that simultaneously takes place across multiple resources without necessarily crossing language boundaries. The findings of this study reveal that the aforementioned resources contribute to transforming narratives. In translation, ‘IS’s’ narratives can be delegitimized and confronted, or the opposite. Examining the changes in these narratives as they are translated in multiple directions is a novel contribution to the field of translation studies in relation to the digital media environment.